The Middle East bids farewell--and good riddance--to the late and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his funeral Monday.

Lying in state outside the Israeli Parliament Sunday, Ariel Sharon [2]was praised at home for being a military hero, while the Middle East united in condemning the former prime minister as a war criminal.

Sharon died Saturday, aged 85, after eight years in a coma. His state funeral will take place Monday.

“The Palestinian people [4]remember today what this former prime minister did in battles and war to uproot us from our land, in particular what took place in Lebanon,” Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said.

In Gaza,[5] Hamas said that Sharon would be remembered for the pain he caused Palestinians.

“When the Palestinian people remember Sharon, they only remember pain, blood, torture, displacement and crimes,” Salah al-Bardaweel, a Hamas spokesman said in a statement. “He is a big criminal and we would never feel sorry for his death.”

Throughout his life, Sharon was at the center of the most contentious episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, starting as a soldier fighting in the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.[10]

In the 1950s, he led a commando unit that carried out reprisals for Arab attacks. In 1953, after the slaying of an Israeli woman and her two children, Sharon’s troops blew up more than 40 houses in Qibya, a West Bank village then ruled by Jordan, killing 69 Arabs, most or all civilians.

He fought in the Israeli-Arab wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973. He launched the 1982 invasion of Lebanon as Israel’s defense minister and was responsible for massacres against the Palestinians, the Egyptians and Lebanese throughout his political and military life.

After his dismissal as defense minister, he gradually rehabilitated himself politically. By the early 1990s, as housing minister in a right-wing government, he oversaw a massive settlement drive in the West Bank.[11]

As opposition leader in September 2000, Sharon visited a contested Jewish-Muslim holy site in Jerusalem, setting off Palestinian protests that quickly escalated into armed uprising.

Less than a year later, he was elected prime minister. In 2002, after a string of Palestinian shootings and bomb attacks, he reoccupied West Bank towns that had been handed to Palestinian self-rule in previous interim peace deals.Sharon also placed his longtime nemesis, then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, under virtual house arrest in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

A close Arafat aide at the time, then-intelligence chief Tawfik Tirawi,[12] said that Sharon’s death was proof that the Palestinians would prevail.

Sharon “wanted to erase the Palestinian people from the map,” Tirawi said. “He wanted to kill us, but at the end of the day, Sharon is dead and the Palestinian people are alive.”